🇪🇨 Ecuador · Sierra (Andean Highlands)
Saquisilí is a town in the province of Cotopaxi, in Ecuador's central highlands, famous for hosting one of the most authentic and crowded Indigenous markets in the country. Although there is officially a market on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, Thursday is the big day: the market takes over the whole town, spreading across eight different plazas, each specialized in different goods, in a spectacle of color, trade and traditional Andean life.
Unlike more tourist-oriented markets, the Saquisilí fair keeps a deeply local, rural character: Indigenous people and farmers from across the Cotopaxi area come here to buy and sell everything, from animals and farm produce to textiles, herbs, ceramics, tools and typical food. It's a genuine immersion in the economy and culture of the Ecuadorian highlands.
This guide covers the essentials of the Saquisilí market: its eight themed plazas (including the busy animal market), what to buy and taste, tips for visiting, and how to get there on a half-day trip from Latacunga or Quito, ideally combining it with other Cotopaxi attractions such as Quilotoa or the Cotopaxi volcano.
Saquisilí has a long tradition as a trading point for the Indigenous peoples of the Cotopaxi highlands, an inheritance of the old Andean barter and market systems from before and after the conquest. Its Thursday market, spread across eight specialized plazas, is considered one of the most authentic in Ecuador and a living heritage of the region's Kichwa culture. The full version is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The province of the Avenue of the Volcanoes: Panzaleo territory dominated by Cotopaxi, one of the highest active volcanoes in the world, with the turquoise Quilotoa lagoon, the Mama Negra of Latacunga, the paintings of Tigua and the Indigenous markets of Saquisilí and Pujilí.
Read the history of Cotopaxi →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Every Thursday before dawn, a town of only a few thousand people in the heart of the province of Cotopaxi turns into one of the largest and most authentic markets in all of Ecuador. Not in one plaza, but in eight at the same time: Saquisilí is one of the very few places in the country where a single day's trading is spread over eight different market spaces, each with its specialty, spilling across whole streets with potatoes, ponchos, herbs, ceramics and animals. The scene looks like something from another century, and to a large extent it is.
The Saquisilí market has its roots in a very long tradition of exchange particular to the Andean world. Long before the Spanish arrived, the peoples of the Andes practiced complex barter systems between communities from different ecological levels: the produce of the high, cold lands —potatoes, Andean grains, wool, meat— was traded for that of the lower, warmer zones —maize, fruit, chili, cotton. Those gatherings, at fixed places and dates, were the seed of the Andean markets.
The Cotopaxi region, in the central highlands, with its dense Indigenous population and its variety of farming zones, was a natural setting for markets of this kind. Because of its location, Saquisilí established itself as one of the great meeting and trading points for the peoples of the area, a role it keeps, week after week, to this day.
The settlement of Saquisilí is far older than the Spanish conquest and even than the arrival of the Incas. The area was inhabited by the Panzaleo people, one of the pre-Inca cultures of the central Ecuadorian highlands, and everything suggests it was a trading center from the start: its role as a barter place was not invented by 20th-century tourism, it comes from far back.
With the expansion of the Inca empire northwards in the late 15th century, the region was absorbed into Tahuantinsuyo. According to the most widespread interpretations, the name 'Saquisilí' itself dates from that period, linked to Quichua-Aymara words that point to the idea of 'leaving' or 'entrusting something' —an etymology that fits a place where people left and entrusted goods for trade. As with so many Andean place names, the exact meaning is not entirely certain and should be taken as a likely interpretation.
After the Spanish conquest, the colonial system reorganized Indigenous settlements through 'reducciones' of towns, but it did not do away with the markets: the one in Saquisilí survived and adapted, keeping its role of supply and exchange for the communities of the district. That continuity —from the Panzaleos to the Incas, from the colony to the republic— is what gives the market its character as living heritage.
Through the colonial period and much of the republican era, Saquisilí was a parish administratively dependent on other jurisdictions in the Latacunga area. Its church and central square, typical of colonial and republican Andean town planning, became the core around which the town grew and around which the market spread, week after week.
Political recognition came in the middle of the 20th century. Ecuador's National Congress approved the creation of the canton of Saquisilí by a decree of early October 1943, published in Registro Oficial No. 940 on 18 October of that year. Since then, Saquisilí celebrates its cantonization every 18 October, and that date has become one of the marks of local identity and pride. The province it belongs to, Cotopaxi, is one of the richest in Indigenous culture and volcanic scenery in the whole Ecuadorian sierra.
The move from parish to canton consolidated the town's administrative autonomy, but what put it on the map of the country —and of cultural tourism— was never politics, it was the market. Canton status gave it structure; the market of the eight plazas gave it fame.
What sets Saquisilí apart from any other market in Ecuador is its peculiar organization: the market is not concentrated in one place but spreads across eight plazas and streets of the town, each specialized in one type of product. This layout, the result of the market's own evolution over generations, makes it possible to order the enormous volume of trade and gives the visit its characteristic structure of a walk through different atmospheres.
So there are plazas devoted to farm produce (potatoes in a thousand varieties, barley, quinoa, chochos, broad beans, mellocos), others to textiles and clothing, to medicinal and aromatic herbs, to ceramics and utensils, to crafts, to typical food, and the busy, early-rising animal market, on the edge of town near the bus terminal. Walking these plazas means crossing the whole spectrum of the material and economic life of the Andean countryside, in an intense sensory experience of colors, smells, sounds and haggling in Kichwa and Spanish.
Although there is officially a market on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, Thursday is the day of greatest cultural concentration, when Indigenous people from the Cotopaxi communities come down from the mountains in their traditional ponchos and anacos. The predominantly local character of the market —where buyer and seller are, above all, farmers from the area and not tourists— is what keeps it one of the most genuine in the country.
Beyond its commercial function, the Saquisilí market is an expression of living culture. In its plazas you hear Kichwa alongside Spanish, you see the traditional dress —ponchos, anacos, felt hats— of the different Cotopaxi communities, and practices of trade, food and sociability inherited over generations are kept alive. The market is, in itself, a space of social encounter where the community gathers, exchanges news and reaffirms its bonds.
That authenticity has been recognized as a cultural and tourist asset of the first order. Saquisilí is considered one of the most important and genuine Indigenous markets in Ecuador, and it draws travelers interested in Andean culture without the filters of mass tourism —unlike the more commercial market of Otavalo. A visit is usually built into trips around the province of Cotopaxi, alongside natural icons such as the Cotopaxi volcano and the Quilotoa lagoon, and the provincial capital, Latacunga, famous for its chugchucaras.
The challenge ahead is to preserve that authentic character against the pressures of modernization and of tourism itself. For now, every Thursday, the Saquisilí market keeps spilling across the town's eight plazas with the same vitality as always, offering the visitor one of the most vivid and truthful windows into the rural and Indigenous culture of the Ecuadorian highlands.